How Vancity Distributed its $156K Budget to Attract Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Key Takeaways

Overall Vancity invested $916K on social, display, and video advertising since January 2019. 17% of this budget was invested into ads targeting small and medium businesses. There were two spikes in Vancity’s B2B ads over the last two years — summer 2019 and May 2020.

Messaging — Use Images that Relate to Businesses of Various Sizes: For its first B2B campaign in the summer of 2019, Vancity aired a number of creatives aiming to appeal to small business owners accompanied by a copy “Get an account that’s made for businesses like yours.” In its second B2B campaign, Vancity also deployed a very empathetic tone of voice that spoke directly to the business owners — “It’s our business to keep yours open”. Addressing the business directly by saying “you/’your” in the ads helps build trust and makes the ads feel more personal.

Channels — Vancity Relies Mostly on Facebook to Run its B2B Ads Directed at Small and Medium-Sized Businesses: 89% of its total B2B budget was invested in Facebook, while the remaining 11% were distributed amongst various websites to place HTML banners.

Approach — Vancity Keeps its Campaigns Running for Several Months to Ensure Sufficient Reach: the credit union tends to air one B2B campaign at a time and keep it running for several months to ensure appropriate frequency. The “Unity Pivot Business Loan” campaign was running for 4 months and drove 6.3K visits to its landing page.

Looking at the traffic coming to Vancity’s business accounts landing page, there weren’t any noticeable spikes during the campaign periods. The most recent traffic increase (Aug 2021) was driven by internal referrals and direct visits.

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Since January 2019, Vancity spent $916K on digital advertising.

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17% ($156K) of the total budget was allocated to running ads aimed at attracting new small and medium business clients.

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There were two noticeable spikes in Vancity’s digital ads budget distribution in favor of B2B ads. In the summer of 2019, the credit union invested $65K into an ad campaigning designed to appeal to various business owners and get them to sign up for a business account. In May 2020, Vancity created a campaign addressing the businesses affected by COVID-19 lockdowns.

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When it comes to reaching small and medium business owners, Vancity mainly relies on Facebook links ($113K in ad spend) and carousels ($26K). 

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Looking into the B2B ads Vancity ran since January 2019, the ad communicating the Unity Pivot Business Loan designed to help businesses fight against COVID-19 received the largest investment — $56K (36% of total budget). 

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Looking into the landing pages where Vancity directs its ad traffic, the credit union concentrated on driving traffic to the Unity Pivot Loan page ($56K) and the Business Accounts overview page.

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To promote the “Unity Pivot Business Loan” campaign (Apr. – Sep. 2020), Vancity spent $56K on Facebook ads which drove 6.3K traffic to the campaign landing page.  

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Looking at overall traffic to the Business Accounts page, Vancity didn’t see elevated traffic during the months of active advertising campaigns. The traffic spike in August 2021 comes from increased direct visits and internal referrals. 

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